WASHINGTON, D.C. -- An email exchange between former Plain Dealer columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Connie Schultz and a conservative blogger -- posted on her Facebook page -- is stirring up the internet. (See a summary of events below, powered by Storify.)

Schultz, a longtime reporter and columnist at the newspaper who resigned in September 2011, is married to Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown -- a fact which the so far unnamed blogger was apparently unaware.

Schultz posted to her Facebook pageTuesday night what she said was an email exchange between her and the blogger.

According to a column called "Washington Whispers" on the U.S. News and World Report's website: "The blogger emailed Schultz on July 9 to say, smugly: 'Dear Ms. Shultz, We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him. Care to comment?' "

Schultz' response: "Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]: I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He's really cute. He's also my husband. You know that, right?"

There has apparently been no communication between the two over the last week, but she wrote on her Facebook site Tuesday: "Waiting, I'm waiting...."

The twittersphere has been abuzz over the exchange all day today and the story was picked up by several other news organizations covering Washington, D.C.

Schultz said this morning that she hasn't named the blogger because she wants him to "pick better company and do better journalism."

"I don't want to be a bully," she said in a telephone interview. "I can say he was working for one of the larger conservative blogs, but that his name is not in the staff directory. Maybe he's an intern, maybe an editor was playing a joke on him or maybe he was trying to get a reaction out of me.

"But I just want him to stop hanging around with those people and learn something out of this."

Schultz married Brown in 2004. She took a leave of absence during her husband's 2006 Ohio Senate race, returned to the paper in 2007 and left in 2011, citing the conflict between her job and her husband's political position.

Conservatives had criticized Schultz and The Plain Dealer, saying that she used her column to support her husband's political career. Both Schultz and the leadership of the newspaper, however, had maintained that her words are her own, and pointed out that she began writing about workers' rights and other liberal causes long before she married Brown.

She said when she resigned in 2011 that it had "become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I'm no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband's senate race on a daily basis."